Buck Rogers 2 - That Man on Beta (2 page)

He stood in the center of the room, the door whispered shut behind him. The figure behind the desk turned its head toward him, spoke in a remarkably natural-sounding voice, for all that the sounds were generated electronically under the command of the figure’s own computer.

“He’s busy,” the figure said.

Buck turned aside and found a seat for himself. He returned his attention to the white figure. It was a secretarial robot. For all that its functions were impersonal and administrative, extensive psychological testing of Inner City executives had shown that they could work most effectively with robots cast into forms at least suggestive of human beings.

The secretarial robot was a Lisa 5 model, and without being female in any biological sense, its fabrication was in lines whose grace was suggestive of a young woman and its programming gave it—or
her
—the mannerisms and voice of an intelligent, educated young woman of an earlier century.

The robot looked expectantly at Buck Rogers.

“I’ll wait,” Buck grated impatiently.

“I don’t see you on his calendar,” the robot answered. Although she had the information in her data-banks, she politely went through the motions of examining a desk calendar, her gracefully formed mechanical fingers tracing the day’s schedule as her electronic visual scanners tracked across the orderly notations.

“I don’t see you on his calendar,” the mechanical, yet pleasantly feminine, voice repeated.

“I’m not on his calendar,” Buck grinned, “I’m on his bench.”

The robot-receptionist sat for a moment in puzzled silence. If she had had the right relays and capacitors, she might have frowned in concentration. “I can’t quite compute that, Captain Rogers,” she said at last. “Perhaps there’s something wrong with my circuits.”

“You’ve got a great set of circuits, kid,” Buck wisecracked.

The robot scanned her anatomy uncertainly. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” Buck said more to himself than the Lisa 5, “everything looks good to a guy after five hundred years, just about.”

The Lisa 5 turned back to her work. She pulled a sheet of paper from a slot in her desk, slipped it into the futuristic equivalent of what Buck would have recognized, in his own era, as a super-typewriter with advanced data-storage and -retrieval circuits built into its chassis, and began to type. Her fingers moved faster than Buck’s eyes could follow; they appeared to turn into a translucent white blur. Almost before she had started typing, the Lisa 5 pulled the completed page from her typewriter and slipped it into another slot in her desk. With an almost inaudible whoosh the sheet of paper disappeared into the desk and was carried away to its destination.

“Who taught you to type?” Buck asked the female robot. “Some kind of speed demon?”

“Demons are an unscientific superstition unsubstantiated by any objectively verifiable evidence,” the robot answered coolly. “Typing programs are coded into the circuitry of all Lisa 5 secretarial robots. We come from the factory with the capability already present in us.”

Buck crossed the room and leaned familiarly across the desk. In a low voice he suggested, “Maybe sometime after work we could go out for a can of 3-in-One oil.” While he held the robot’s attention by speaking, he surreptitiously flicked on the intercom button built into the control panel of her desk.

Before the robot could respond to Buck’s invitation, a panel slid smoothly aside in the wall behind her. Beyond the reception room lay an elaborate office. In it stood the science wizard of the Inner City, the man who had first evaluated Buck on the spaceman’s return to the city from the Draconian space fleet that had found his ship in its five-hundred-year orbit. On that occasion Huer had sympathized with the astronaut, sided with him, and helped him through his trial with the Inner City computer council.

Now the brilliant, ascetic Huer peered into the outer chamber from his office. “Lisa, what’s going on out there?” he addressed the secretarial robot.

Before the robot could answer, Buck cut in. “Dr. Huer, it’s all my fault. Can I see you for a minute?”

“Rogers. Of course. You know my door is always open to you.”

“If I can find it,” Buck grinned.

“Come in,” the aged scientist gestured, “come in.”

As the young spaceman entered the inner office, the wall panel slid closed behind him, leaving the Lisa 5 alone once more at her desk. With soundless efficiency the robot slipped another blank sheet of paper into her typewriter and poised slim mechanical fingers above the keyboard. Before she began typing, however, she swiveled her head in the direction of the inner office, where Buck Rogers had disappeared. “Three and one oil?” the robot murmured to herself. “Why not say four oil instead?”

T W O

Inside the office of the science wizard, Buck Rogers and Dr. Huer settled into comfortable seats. “I hope you’re thriving on our hospitality, Captain Rogers,” the scientist said.

“Hey, great,” Buck exclaimed. “It’s terrific, Doc. I like the twenty-fifth-century chow. The Vinol’s tops—better than the bubbly I could afford on air force pay back in the 1980s.”

“But,” Dr. Huer peered seriously into the younger man’s face, “you have a complaint, eh?”

“It’s . . . not quite a complaint,” Buck conceded. “More of a request, I guess. It’s that—well, Doc, there’s more to life than food and drink . . .”

Dr. Huer smiled knowingly. “Oh, so
that’s
it. Well, that’s understandable. It’s been five hundred years. Just ask any of the men in the defense squadron for directions to the Palace of Pleasure.”

“No, no, no,” Buck snorted. “I don’t mean that. You don’t have to worry about me in that department. I can take care of myself.”

Dr. Huer raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure that’s such a good idea for a grown man, Buck?”

Buck Rogers sat, puzzled for a moment. Then his breath exploded. “No, no, no!” he repeated.
“That
isn’t what I meant, either. Dr. Huer, what I mean is this—”

The aged scientist leaned forward expectantly.

“I need a leave of absence,” Buck went on. “Not just from flying duty—I’d talk to Wilma if that were the only thing. No, I have to leave the Inner City, at least for a while. I need to go out into Anarchia. I’ve got to—to find out what happened to my family. I’ve got to know if I have anyone left on Earth. Of course my immediate family were all gone centuries ago. But do I have descendants anywhere on Earth? Or off it, for that matter—anywhere in the galaxy?”

The jocular atmosphere of a few minutes earlier had disappeared. Buck strode around Dr. Huer’s office like a restless lion patrolling the bars of its cage. “Do you know what isolation is, Doc? What we used to call alienation in my day? A sense of not belonging, of being cut off from all of humankind? I have to find out if I have a blood connection to any living, breathing human being.”

Buck returned to his comfortable chair and slumped into it, his shoulders sagging and his head downcast. “I feel so . . . so . . . alone, Doc.”

“I understand,” Huer nodded. “It must be very difficult coming from a different time and place. Suddenly finding yourself in a new world, half a millennium out of your own time.”

“It’s funny,” Buck said, but not with any sign of amusement. “If this were some different planet and I couldn’t get home, somehow that wouldn’t be quite as frustrating. I’d know that my own people were still alive, might still be alive. Somehow, somewhere.

“But this isn’t a different place. My home was only 30 or 40 miles from here. I mean, 50 or 60 kilometers. I’ve got to see it. What’s left of it. Or even what
isn’t
left of it.”

“That could be very dangerous,” Dr. Huer put in. “It isn’t just kilometers—miles—that are at stake. Once you pass beyond the Inner City’s dome, we can’t offer you protection. Anything could happen out there, Buck.”

“But I have to do it,” Buck dissented. “What I have to do is track down my—I don’t know. It’s not my roots I want to trace. It’s sort of . . . my sprouts.” As Buck’s irrepressible humor broke through his seriousness, he found himself unwillingly grinning again.

“But the last time you went out there—when we mistakenly exiled you from the Inner City, Buck—you found your family’s graves. You wouldn’t leave Anarchia until you found them. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes,” Buck conceded. “My parents were dead and buried in old Chicago, what you now call Anarchia. And so were my brother and my sister. But maybe
someone
survived. A cousin, a niece or nephew. And if someone survived the holocaust back in the twentieth century, they might have had children. And
they
might have had children. I’d have living relatives now. For all I know,
you
might be my great-great-great-whatever, my nephew, Doc. I need to
know!”

The old scientist smiled at the notion that the young man opposite him might be an ancestor of his. Then a more serious expression replaced the smile on his face. “Buck,” he said earnestly, “I can’t let you go out there. The odds are too slim. And you’re too valuable to the Inner City. If only for your knowledge of the Earth of the twentieth century. But beyond that, you’re such a natural starfighter pilot. We can’t afford to let you risk your life.”

“You let me risk my life fighting the Draconians,” Buck snapped back angrily. “I’m not too valuable for that risk, am I!”

“But that was for the common good of all,” Huer almost pleaded. “That was a risk taken for all of Earth—I might even say, for all of civilization.”

“So what’s my family,” Buck asked with a combination of bitterness and wry humor, “chopped liver?”

Huer’s response was a look of bafflement.

Buck tried more directly: “Are you going to let me go or aren’t you?”

Dr. Huer shook his head. “I can’t take the chance of having you killed or captured by a pack of savages or mutants, Buck. I don’t suppose it would help if I said that I have your own welfare at heart, as well as the needs of the community.”

“No sir, it wouldn’t,” Buck conceded. He stood up and moved toward the exit. “Thank you, sir. Good-bye.”

As the sliding panel that served for a doorway opened before Buck, Dr. Huer took note of the determined set of the younger man’s jaw. A seasoned judge of human behavior, a careful reader of expressions in people’s voices and in their body language, Huer could tell that Buck Rogers was not going to take no for an answer—that the closing of the office panel behind the spaceman was by no means the closing of the matter under discussion.

As Buck strode angrily past the typing desk in the reception office, the Lisa 5 addressed him. “Buck, about that four oil, I’ve never heard of—”

He was gone, totally ignoring the secretarial robot’s words.

“Huh,” the Lisa 5 commented to herself, “five hundred years old, is he? Must be senile by this time!”

Not long after, Buck was at the defense squadron spacefield at the edge of the Inner City dome. Despite his personal problems, while he remained the guest of the Inner City he would always carry out his duties as a rocket pilot bearing the rank of captain in the defense squadron.

The other squadron pilots were gathered, along with Buck, for a technical briefing by their commander, in which she explained to them the features of a new energy-booster system that power engineers had finished installing, just an hour before, on their starfighters.

The pilots included women and men, and members of all the races of Earth. In this regard, at least, the civilization of the twenty-fifth century had not merely recovered the ground lost in the ravaging Third World War half a millennium before, but had made reality of the idealistic goals of the old civilization.

The defense squadron commander, Colonel Wilma Deering, was at the end of her briefing and about to open the floor for questions from her subordinates. “So the new energy pods,” Colonel Deering concluded, “will enable our fighters to go into star warp at least for limited periods.”

Most of the pilots remained silent as they assimilated the new information, but Buck Rogers responded with a sharp question. “What are the outside limits on speed and duration?”

“I think I already covered that point, Captain Rogers,” Wilma Deering replied. In her off-duty hours she was clearly one of the most beautiful, feminine, and desirable women in the Inner City—but on duty she was all crisp military efficiency. “The council has ordered us not to exceed 42,000 D.E.T. or to remain in star warp for longer than 140 S.S. seconds.”

“That isn’t exactly what I asked, Colonel,” Buck shot back. “That’s a policy directive from the political leadership. I was asking the technical limitations of the new gear.”

The eyes of commander and pilot locked in an angry, sparking duel of wills. The relationship between Colonel Deering, commander, and Captain Rogers, pilot, was difficult enough. Rogers was the most skilled and daring of the defense squadron’s spacemen, an incalculable asset to the protection of the Inner City. But he was headstrong, independent, and not amenable to discipline.

If that dilemma wasn’t tough enough to deal with, there was the similarly difficult relationship between Wilma Deering and Buck Rogers.

Well, there wasn’t time to deal with the complexities of such matters now. “The answer I gave you is the official position of the defense squadron,” she answered coldly.